1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix all dry ingredients together. Stir in all wet ingredients to form a slightly elastic, soft, greasy dough. Line cookie sheet with parchment paper
2. Roll the dough out on a piece of wax paper to 1/4" thickness. Cut out shapes using cookie cutters, and place on prepared cookie sheet. If you wish, you can form an indent in the cookie using your thumb and fill it with fruit perserves/jelly/jam or filling.
3. Bake for 20 minutes, and cool on wax paper. Enjoy!
My omnivore mother adores short bread cookies, and she prefers this recipe to any store bought ones. Her favorite variation is topping the cookies with homemade black raspberry jam. I love this recipe because it is insanely simple to mix up, and makes effortless cut-out cookies. The dough is not at all hard to work with!
Other variations include: replacing vanilla extract with almond or maple, adding chocolate chips, adding chopped nuts, adding orange or lemon zest and juice, and swirling the fruit perserves/jelly/jam into the dough.

I'm going to have to make these again. I read a comment about it being more like a biscuit than a cookie so i used half whole wheat pastry flour and half whole wheat flour, but next time i'm going to have to use pastry flour and white flour. I used applesauce instead of oil and put a little anise extract in. I dropped them onto the cookie sheet instead of rolling it out (because i'm lazy and because the dough was kinda sticky) and then frosted with a little powdered sugar, anise, water... and green sugar for St Pattys Day ;)

i did try one with jam on it though and it was delicious! Great recipe :)

Nice, but these were more in the realm of pre-jammed biscuits (scone-biscuits, not cookie-biscuits) than fruity shortbread.

Not surprising, since I realized, as I rolled them out and contemplated the dough's contents, that the ingredients and their proportions are quite similar to biscuit recipes I've used in the past.

I did replace half of the oil with applesauce, but I highly doubt that using only oil would vault the recipe from biscuitland into shortbreadville. I wouldn't make this recipe with the expectation of a cookie without upping the sugar and flavouring. I will, however, give the Chocolate Caramel Shortbread Cookies recipe (which uses this recipe as a base) a try.

I made these because I am dessertaholic but always a little concerned about my sugar intake, so I loved that these had such a small amount of sweetener. I made them as described, sans preserves, but pressed the dough into an 8x8 pan cuz I was lazy. These were SO fast and easy, and they have very basic ingredient. I did find them a little less sweet than I'd like, so next time I'll probably sprinkle sugar on top before baking, or use the preserves. 4 stars - thanks!